To the Editor:
Tom Halleck's article about the charge of tenure bias at UB is based almost entirely on comments at a public meeting by Paul Zarembka, who is wrong in all his facts. Halleck fails to report a good deal of contradictory information presented at the same public meeting.
Ezra Zubrow, president of the UB chapter of United University Professions (the faculty union) and the person charged with looking at grievance matters, said-without qualification-that these cases had been carefully examined and there was absolutely no evidence of gender discrimination. He repeated it later in the meeting. To present the charges and not the Union's independent refutation of them is irresponsible journalism.
At the meeting, President Simpson pointed out that in the past year more men than women candidates were turned down and just as many PRB decisions were reversed in the other direction--faculty members PRB recommended be fired were instead given tenure. Would Zarembka and the others mounting this campaign have those decisions reversed as well?
The basic premise of this attack on Satish Tripathi and John Simpson is wrong. Every university president I've ever known-including Nathan Marsh Pusey at Harvard, Warren Bennis at Cincinnati, Jonetta Cole at Spelman and Steve Sample, Bill Greiner and John Simpson at Buffalo-has said his or her most important function was having final say on tenure decisions. Making those decisions is the president's and provost's job. This isn't some irregular intervention in faculty affairs or usurpation of faculty right and privilege. If the faculty vote were final there'd be no need to send it on to the president at all; a clerk could just hit the piece of paper recording the vote with a rubber stamp.
David Shucard's complaint that faculty have wasted their time if the president is going to turn down some faculty recommendations is, for that reason, more petulant than substantial. In an alternate academic universe university presidents might have no responsibility in tenure decisions, but that is not the case in the academic universe we inhabit. Every committee in the university involved in tenure cases-from initial departmental review committees to the PRB-is advisory, and all of us who have served on those committees know that. This isn't news. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
The ugliest part of this is those bringing these charges in public know perfectly well Provost Tripathi and President Simpson cannot defend themselves against these charges in public. They can't open the files and make the letters and reports public; they cannot talk about the facts of any specific case. The prosecutors are mounting an attack based on little evidence (they haven't seen the dossiers of all the male and female candidates who have been denied or given tenure against the PRB's recommendations) and they've cherry-picked the little evidence they do have (they're counting the nos and ignoring the yesses; they're counting the women and ignoring the men). And they are using that limited, cherry-picked evidence against people whose office prevents them from defending themselves beyond saying, "You're wrong. That's not true."
It's a perfect trap. And that's all it is.
Bruce Jackson
SUNY Distinguished Professor & Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
